Category Archives: Technology

CA Internet security and I haven’t gotten along very well in the past and my attempts to get rid of it were just a continuation of the same problems. Previously I had had problems getting a Removed by HIPS FW error on webpages and that led to me researching the efw file problem that so many people were having. Well, the next and hopefully final problem I’ve had is when trying to uninstall. I was signed in as the administrator but still got a W9011 error claiming I didn’t have the correct permissions and giving me a registry key.

It’s pretty easy to give yourself the correct permissions, but we do have to dive into the registry so you’ll want to be very careful and change only the items that are listed in the error message (or 10 messages as mine ended up)

Here’s what you need to do to fix the problem

Run the uninstall and leave the error message up on the screen

Click on the Start Button and the Click ‘Run’ and type ‘regedit’ and press enter

The Microsoft 2008 Launch event for Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008 in Charlotte, NC has already gotten a negative review from Knetwork writer Franklin Pettit on his on blog. And while I do agree with some of the points Franklin makes I won’t say that the event was a total waste of my time. The free versions of VS 2008, SQL 2008, and the surprise addition of a copy of Windows Vista Ultimate made the trip worthwhile, but the presentations just didn’t have the kick that I’ve gotten used to at Microsoft events.

Let me offer the disclaimer that I don’t regularly program in MS products, I do occasionally and I’ve been considering going for the new certifications when they are released to beef up my knowledge and ability to do work on the side. Still, I love going to MS events because they are so well presented and really get you excited about the work MS is doing for developers. I usually leave an event wanting to go out and try the technology immediately even if I have no ability to do so! To give you idea of how this launch event went, I haven’t installed any of that nice new, shiny, powerful software yet. It’s still shrink wrapped a week later. I wasn’t motivated, I wasn’t inspired, and I wasn’t impressed.

All this is not to say that these products aren’t great and that the new features weren’t covered, it’s just that the coverage was a watered down rehash of info gone over at MSDN Events or was presented without any point of reference to how it was better. If you have a captive audience staring a big screen then make use of the visual! I was 75% of the way towards the back and I couldn’t read any of the code unless the presenter zoomed his screen (this only happened once while I was there). If you want the audience to Oooooh and Aaaaah like they’re watching a knife cut through a cement block then you’re going to have to give us some eye candy… why no silverlight?!? Being in Beta is no excuse, it has never stopped an MSDN Event presenter from showing us the goods.

All said I’ll keep coming to the launch events for the software, but I hope to see better presentations in the future. MS knows you can’t do much that’s meaningful in the short time we’re a captive audience so give us a quick run down if the changes, some before and after code samples, and lots of eye-candy!

And you want to know what it means, you want it decrypted and according to my post title you think I’ve got the answer…

I Don’t :-p

*UPDATE: Thanks to Knetwork Reader Frank for posting the needed cypher (ROT13). The text BUJUNGNSBBYVNZ decrypts to OHWHATAFOOLIAM or Oh What A Fool I Am. And as an extra bonus I’m not going to kill you now that I told you!

Happy April Fool’s Day! I’ll tell you what I would suggest, order yourself $20 worth of goods, get the shirt free, and maybe they will give you the decryption key. Of course it’s entirely possible that the shirt doesn’t decrypt to anything or that if someome tells you what it means, they’d kill you. If you’re going to order something I suggest that you pick up a USB Rocket Launcher. You know you want to…

Happy Easter! It seemed appropriate to put together a list of Easter Egg sites, and I’m not talking about the beautiful colored eggs, I mean those little surprises hidden away in movies, DVDs, games, software, and web pages.

Easter Eggs in Movies and DVDs:

DVDEasterEggs – Focuses on Easter eggs in DVDs and helpfully includes the region code. If you have a huge DVD collection consider signing for the RSS feed to give you something new to look for when you watch your favorite movies over again.

Netflix – The DVD rental by mail site lists lots of easter eggs for the movies it has, need something for your queue? Take a look and see any of these sound interesting to you.

IMDB - While not official listed as easter eggs, you can find a lot of theme under the “Fun Stuff” category on the sidebar. Just check out the movie you’re about to see and find out if there’s anything you should be looking for.

Easter Eggs in Games:

GameSpot – GameSpot has a great article listing the Greatest Easter Eggs in Gaming History, a good read if you want to hit the highlights.

YahoVideoGames – Another list from YVG of their favorite gaming easter eggs.

DigitPress – Hits a lot of the older games, lists eggs by system and then game.

Easter Eggs in Software:

SoftwareTipsAndTricks – This computer help site has amassed a great collection of easter eggs hidden in various operating systems and other common applications

FreeSoftwareMagazine – This site that caters to free and OS software users has a list of easter eggs in free software.

Easter Eggs on Web Pages:

robert.accettura – This is a fun list of eggs that can be found in the HTML of some of the larger sites

The latest beta version of the TipThis plugin now has a sidebar widget! This will allow users who don’t want to spam their blog frontpage with Tip This buttons to have a way to accept tips on their main page. Just go to the Presentation portion of your WordPress admin dashboard and drag the TipJoy Widget onto the sidebar!